Control Resonata: Why Remedy Swapped a Shooter for an RPG
Seven years after the original, Remedy Entertainment has released Control: Resonata, the second entry in a series that helped define what players call new weird fiction — stories that mix mundane institutions with inexplicable supernatural objects. The first Control, launched in 2019, put players inside a Brutalist government building called the Oldest House and handed them a transforming service weapon. It sold on atmosphere and a strange, bureaucratic dread that owed a lot to SCP-style lore, a genre of internet storytelling about anomalous objects catalogued by a secret agency.
The sequel changes two things at once, and that is why some players are hesitating. Combat moves from third-person shooter to action role-playing game, meaning numbers, builds and gear now matter as much as aim. The protagonist also shifts from Jesse Faden to her brother Dylan, a character who spent the first game mostly off-screen and unreliable as a narrator. For a series built on a single strong voice, swapping the lead is a real gamble.
On the Chinese gaming podcast Gcores, three hosts — Lingzi, Brushi and Ajie — spent an episode digging into the change. Their verdict leaned positive but nuanced. They argued that Remedy’s strength has never been gunplay. It is staging: the way a corridor turns into a set piece, the way a room’s lighting tells you something is wrong before any enemy appears. If the shooting was always the weakest link, replacing it with deeper character progression may free the studio to lean harder into what it does best.
One host used a blunt metaphor: if one plank of a barrel is unusually long, the barrel stops being a barrel and becomes a hammer. The point was that Remedy’s lopsided talents are the appeal. A polished, balanced, thoroughly ordinary action game would be less interesting than a flawed one with two or three unforgettable sequences.
Resonata also arrives into a crowded season. The hosts noted the game is competing with big-budget releases landing in the same window, and that a seven-year gap between installments means an entire cohort of players never touched the original. Remedy has kept the series alive through connected projects and expansions, but the audience has to be rebuilt almost from scratch.
For Chinese players, the conversation has a familiar shape. New weird fiction has a devoted following here, sustained by translated novels, indie games and a steady stream of online discussion about anomalous objects and haunted institutions. Control sits at the center of that taste. So the question isn’t whether the aesthetic lands — it clearly does. It’s whether an action role-playing game can keep the tension that made the first title feel like walking through someone else’s nightmare.
Early impressions from the podcast suggest the answer is mostly yes, with caveats. The new systems take time to open up, the early hours are slower than returning fans expect, and Dylan is a harder character to like than Jesse. But the set pieces reportedly still hit, and the world-building remains the draw.
Whether Resonata becomes the definitive version of Remedy’s strangest franchise, or a fascinating misfire, may depend on how patient players are. The hosts’ advice was simple: give it a few hours past the opening, and judge it on the moments you remember a week later.